The News & Record printed my letter to the editor...

You can read it here on the News & Record's website. Since it's something about their blogs, it seems only right to mention it on my own :-) It's evoked quite a lively debate too, from the looks of it. I just posted a response of my own, something that was a little longer than the paper's policy on editorial letters would allow. Ahhh the wonders of electronic publishing...

Anyway, I'm proud that they saw it fit for publication. And if anyone is finding their way over here from it, let me say welcome to ya!!

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Gonzo send-off for the master of the artform

It could only have happened at a funeral for Hunter S. Thompson...
About 350 friends of the late writer - including Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in the movie version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - descended on Thompson's ranch at Woody Creek, Colorado to blast the gonzo journalist's cremated remains into the air in a fireworks display.

Here's the monument that's been raised to Thompson's memory: it's only like two feet taller than the Washington Monument (which is probably how Thompson would have wanted it) and the moment when Thompson's mortal remains were supposedly dispersed into the stratosphere...

Hunter S. Thompson has always held a lot of fascination for me, ever since I first read about him back in '89 (it was a Time magazine story that had that photo of Thompson shooting a typewriter with a shotgun out in the snow). Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of my all-time favorite books (and the movie just keeps getting better with each new viewing). Something about the guy's style, how it was like a running commentary of whatever flashed across his synapses (which were more often than not pretty well "chemically enhanced"). I've tried - and failed, miserably - to honor his style at times, but I just can't nail it. Maybe someday. That's one of my missions in life as a writer: to develop my own voice as a gonzo journalist, not in imitation but inspired somewhat by Thompson... minus the drugs 'course :-P

Anyway, I thought it would be pretty fitting to honor his memory (even though others may not agree with me doing so) with a journalistic nod of my own. Happy trails "Raoul Duke", wherever you are...

You can read more about Thompson's funeral here.

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Can I play it on my Atari 2600?

If you've ever wanted to play id Software's original Doom game on your iPod or your digital camera or your calculator or your Kenmore microwave oven (am not sure about that last one though) go to ItPlaysDoom.com and find a port so you can get your Doom fix anywhere and everywhere.

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AMC's month-long James Bond run is good watchin'

AMC channel has been running them in sequential order every weeknight this month and right now they're showing The Man With The Golden Gun (with Christopher Lee as Scaramanga, who also predates Krusty as the the original "man with the superfluous third nipple"), so this has been the perfect time to watch all those James Bond movies that I've never caught before. I'll sadly admit that most 007 flicks have always been just off my radar range (the last one I saw was GoldenEye and I thought it was a rollickin' hella good ride!) but I think I'm finally starting to "get" the chemistry that's made this such a classic movie series. Friday night they ran The Spy Who Loved Me, which I'd also never seen before (as was the case with The Man With The Golden Gun the night before that) and tomorrow night they're playing Moonraker, the very first Bond movie I ever saw (when ABC ran it one Sunday night back in '84). I'm hard-pressed to tell you which Bond is my favorite though: I'm a big fan of Pierce Brosnan in the role, and Roger Moore is always gonna have a special place 'cuz he's the one I really "grew up" with and I've never seen the Timothy Dalton ones, but Sean Connery's Bond - the one that many argue was the greatest - is starting to really grow on me. As for favorite villain hmmm... well gotta love Goldfinger, and Scaramanga, and Blofeld of course (whatever did happen to SPECTER anyway?) but I think we need to see a return of Jaws: Richard Kiel is still looking pretty buff, c'mon put the cobalt teeth back in him and turn him loose! Anyway, most of these movies seem very dated by today's standards, but something about them still holds up pretty well. Who knows, maybe someday I'll have to make room on my shelf for a bunch of Bond DVDs :-)

EDIT: Richard Kiel is back as Jaws!! He reprises the role in the videogame 007 Everything or Nothing. Also starring in the game are Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, John Cleese as Q, Judi Dench as M (LOVED her in GoldenEye) and Willem Dafoe as the usual Bond supervillain. It's available on Xbox so I may have to check this out! :-)

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Favorite post of the week

Of all the posts I made this past week, this one has paws-down gotta be my favorite :-) Guess I'm a sucker for little dogs or something...

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This guy just hit on a surefire way to end ALL Islamic terrorism...

A rabbi in Israel wants to hang bags of pig fat in buses, as a means of deterring suicide bombers. The pig is a ceremoniously "unclean" animal in Islam (as it is in Judaism) but as some radical Muslims are in actual fear of being buried in pig skins and thus avoid the animals entirely, it might be enough to keep any with wrong intentions in mind a good safe distance away.

This lends itself toward another idea: serve large amounts of pork rinds on all commercial airline flights and means of mass transit. Leave the crumbs in the aisles and seat cushions. Make the entire plane and bus a massive poison pill to would-be terrorists and voila: a practical end to most terrorism!

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Kyle Williams makes Jerry Falwell look positively mediocre, again...

I guess that's why WorldNetDaily isn't giving Kyle a top-of-the-page link anymore on Saturdays.

I do have to wonder why this is, seriously: Kyle Williams (along with Vox Day) is the most original, articulate and beautifully-written columnist that WND has. Lately WND is treating him like a pariah, or a crazy uncle kept down in the basement: they know that we know he's down there, but they don't want to bring him any more attention. Instead they give Falwell his regular front-page link, even though Falwell hasn't written anything original for WND since... Lord only knows.

Well, the Christian wunderkind that is Kyle Williams has another great piece this week and so its my task as usual to alert both my faithful readers to it: Click here for Young Master Kyle's latest, an essay titled "The empty lie of self-gratification".

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Hospital MRIs attracting all kinds of trouble (sorta funny NYT article)

This ain't from The Onion folks. I wanna say this is funny but it's not really, but it's still something you have to almost laugh at: New York Times is reporting about the rising frequency of ferrous objects flying through the air toward the super-powerful magnets in hospital magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment...

M.R.I.'s Strong Magnets Cited in Accidents

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Published: August 19, 2005

The pictures and stories are the stuff of slapstick: wheelchairs, gurneys and even floor polishers jammed deep inside M.R.I. scanners whose powerful magnets grabbed them from the hands of careless hospital workers.

The magnets inside M.R.I. scanners can pull in office furniture.

The police officer whose pistol flew out of his holster and shot a wall as it hit the magnet. The sprinkler repairman whose acetylene tank was yanked inside, breaking its valve and starting a fire that razed the building.

But the bigger picture is anything but funny, medical safety experts say. As the number of magnetic resonance imaging scanners in the country has soared from a handful in 1980 to about 10,000 today, and as magnets have quadrupled in power, careless accidents have become more frequent. Some have caused serious injuries and even death.

No one knows how many have occurred. But the safety experts say there is no doubt they are on the rise, and their growing frequency is prompting widespread calls for more regulation.

Safety guidelines drawn up by the American College of Radiology in 2002 and revised last year "have no teeth and are floating out there in intellectual Never-Never Land," Tobias Gilk, a Kansas City architect who designs medical scanning rooms, said.

He continued: "The X-ray in your dentist's office is more heavily regulated."

Hit here if you're attracted to the rest of the story. There's some pretty funny pictures there too, like one showing an office chair lodged inside an MRI.

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Hack your car, get 300 miles per gallon!?

Good ol' American ingenuity never ceases to amaze...The Telegraph in London has a story about people "hacking" their hybrid automobiles (the ones that use alternating gasoline and electricity to power the car). Many are reporting some pretty outrageous mileages...

Hot-rod heirs customise cars to give 300mpg
By Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles
(Filed: 16/08/2005)

Owners of hybrid cars claim to be stealing a march on their makers by customising them to go even further for less fuel, in one case doing up to 300 miles per gallon.

Green-minded enthusiasts in California are turning the popular vehicles into "plug-in cars" that can be recharged using off-peak electricity from the mains.

The fuel-efficient hybrids, such as the Toyota Prius, Honda Civic and Ford Escape, have two computer-integrated engines: a petrol and an electric one.

Both drive the wheels with the battery-powered motor charged up during braking and coasting. Unlike electric cars, they never need to be plugged in and achieve 60-72mpg, against 26-42mpg for the average car and 14-24 in a 4x4 vehicle.

Now a small but growing number of "hackers" are souping up models by reprogramming their computer and packing them with extra batteries that provide more electrical kick and burn even less fuel.

Critics say that rather than revolutionising fuel efficiency or cutting pollution, hybrid cowboys rely on coal-fired power stations for energy.

Ron Gremban, an electrical engineer and environmentalist in San Francisco, has spent £1,660 customising his Toyota Prius, fitting it with 18 electric bicycle batteries that allow the car to store extra power.

He plugs it into a domestic socket at night using power from solar panels. The extra batteries let Mr Gremban drive for 20 miles with a 50-50 mix of petrol and electricity. After the car runs out of battery it switches to the standard hybrid mode. Mr Gremban said he typically gets 96mpg. "This is a very dramatic breakthrough, especially in the sense that it relies on existing technology so we don't have to wait for any developments such as with hydrogen technology."

He was inspired to alter his car, he said, after learning that Asian Prius models had a "stealth" button enabling them to be switched to electric-only mode until they hit a certain speed.

The electronic tweaks he performed "fool the hybrid system into thinking the battery is fully charged" so it uses battery power at all speeds, rather than just during deceleration...

Cruise over here for the rest of the article.

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Nintendo is going to the dogs!

I'd never heard of this at all until I saw a commercial for it earlier tonight. Ever since I've spent a good part of the evening hunting down any bit of info I could find about it. The more and more I'm finding, the more captivated I'm becoming with the idea of this lil' gimmick.

Coming out next week for the Nintendo DS (which along with its own price drop might be another good reason to finally put this on the Christmas wish list) is Nintendogs. At first look I thought this was gonna be something like those darned annoying Tamagotchi "virtual pets" that were all the rage several years ago (how many kids wailed in mourning after finding their precious Tamagotchi perished from malnutrition during their fifth-period spelling test? No wonder they were singled out for banning by many schools). It has some characteristics similar to Pokemon (which was a concept I dug a lot more). But otherwise Nintendogs is in a class all its own: it's a 3D puppy simulator that puts ALL the things that come with dog ownership (including having to break out the pooper-scooper) into the palm of your hand. Coming in three varieties (Chihuahua, Dachshund, and Lab), each one gives you about five different breeds of dog to choose from. Then you choose sex, then coat of fur, and then naming the dog... which is where the Nintendo DS's built-in microphone comes in. Yup, turns out you can actually speak commands to your digital doggie and he'll roll over, fetch the ball or bark. You gotta feed and water Fido too else he looks sickly and malnourished after a few days of no playing (I've no idea how far Nintendo is taking THAT part of the concept). Bring the system to nearby DSes that also have Nintendogs loaded and your pooch will "sense" other dogs in the vicinity and supposedly play with them if they are friendly or grow at them if they are not. And a ton of other stuff that sounds pretty amazing.

Nintendogs are apparently THE hot thing in Japan right now and based on early word they're gonna be a hit on this side of the pond too. Why? Well, if they're this realistic a simulation of a dog as it purports to be, this may be a nice thing to "tide ya over" if you're in a situation (like me) that it's not feasible to have a dog for the time being... but you still can't help being a dog lover. So help me I'm tempted to run out first thing next week and buy a Nintendo DS and the Dachshund edition 'cuz I'm a bigtime lover of weiner-dogs! I mean, how can you resist a videogame box that looks like this...?!

Anyway, I thought Nintendogs was well worth a mention here. Do a Google News search for the latest on these virtual bow-wows and there's a nice writeup about them already at USA Today.

And if you REALLY wanna see how cool this is, watch this MPEG-format video from Nintendo that shows off Nintendogs potential.

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82nd Airborne to Iraq isn't passing the smell test?

Something doesn't jibe here...

I found on the news tonight that the Pentagon is sending 700 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg to Iraq. Supposedly to be guard detail over detained insurgents and other prisoners.

Why are so many of the 82nd Airborne, a paratrooper division - and one of the most elite units of soldiers in the entire Army - being sent in to do something so relatively, well... un-paratrooperish as transporting prisoners and bolstering prison defenses?

Say I'm seeing too much into it, but this is something like flying a 747 into the regional airport at Hooterville. You don't bring in the 82nd Airborne unless it's for really major operations, usually. That's what they're trained for. That's what they're expecting. Either the Pentagon is getting very hard-up desperate for more soldiers to fill out the ranks in an existing theater of operations... or they're looking at expanding that theater of operations. Or possibly opening up an entirely new one.

But hey, as I've said before: I'm just a guy with a blog. What do I know?

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I posted something to Democratic Underground a little while ago...

Even though it's been about a year since I promised myself I wouldn't become involved in the political discussion forums anymore. Guess you could say that after years of Free Republic and then Liberty Post, I woke up one morning, looked at myself in the mirror and didn't like what I was becoming. Nothing gets resolved in forums like these: they tend to be ugly and they were making me ugly in spirit.

So I've been away from them, and a lot happier for it. But in the case of my essay about the Cindy Sheehan protest down in Texas from the other day, I was way more than a little curious as to what kind of reaction it would bring from those who are closest to that. And since a few of my articles here have wound up posted on Democratic Underground, I opted to sign up with "theknightshift" handle and make a little post about it there. Someone over there was even kind enough to give my Sheehan essay its own thread over there. Thanks "Maddy McCall" :-)

I'm thankful for their take on my perspective. But I'm still going to prefer to be out here, instead of taking a more direct role in this kind of dialogue from now on. I enjoy watching all three of these forums, but like Robert E. Lee and alcohol, it is because I enjoy it so much that is the reason I choose not to participate anymore.

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Look, the guy's still pretty new at this...

Pope Benedict XVI forgot to bless the pilgrims that visited his summer residence this week.

Am not Catholic but in a way, that says some good about the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. He sounds pretty humbled by the job he just took, is still "feeling it out", like it's not gotten the best of him. I'm not saying that giving a blessing to a crowd like that is a bad thing, but most people - if given this kind of power and authority - might let it go to their heads pretty quickly, and that's not happening with Benedict apparently.

By the way: after realizing he had forgotten the benediction, he came back out and gave it, offering his apologies to everyone for his absent-mindedness.

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What does this say about the economy?

12,000 people apply for 400 jobs at the new Wal-Mart in Oakland, California.

Man, I don't know whether to say that's a sign of a "recession" or a "depression". I ain't never heard of an applicant/position ratio like THAT before.

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What's next for KWerky Productions?

Forcery, looks like it's going to be broadcast in its entirety on a local television station in the very near future. This station is wanting to have ALL-original programming and they're looking at running films made in this area. For a lot of personal reasons, this station broadcasting my own movie is going to be a real highlight of Forcery's history.

But now, KWerky Productions is looking at other projects. Forcery taught us how to make a movie... and how not to make a movie! We feel emboldened to try a few new things now. So what's next on the plate?

Pre-production has started on Han or Hannah?, which may or may not be the last Star Wars-related fanfilm we do. The premise is simple: What if Ed Wood had made a Star Wars movie. We are going to make this exactly as if Ed Wood himself had done it. Among other things this means that I want to direct it while wearing a woman's dress.

But on the more serious side of things we also want to branch out into our own original stuff. I'm working on a new script right now, involving a subject matter that no one to my knowledge has ever touched on before. I guess you could call it a psychological/supernatural thriller. It's tone is a lot like Pi, which wound up being one of my favorite movies. I'm more into the research phase right now, reading up on everything pertaining to this, and sorta letting the script almost write itself from that.

Then there is something else that, I had this idea last week on the drive back from Georgia and after telling Ed about it he got pretty excited. We're hoping to get the ball rolling on this soon 'cuz it'd be a pretty new and bold route to making a movie, and it would be a neat way to render some community service of a sort.

And Ed has an idea for a music video. After hearing about it, I so want to make this! Maybe around Halloween we can have it ready (hint-hint).

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Unclogging the crap from a cranky computer

So last night Lisa and I had dinner at the home of a family from church (this guy makes a pretty mean ravioli) and his wife asked if I could take a look at their computer: seems it was going torturously slow. So after the blackberry cobber dessert I followed 'em upstairs and went to work. It was indeed slow as molasses. Slower even. I spent the next hour and a half working on the thing. And ya know what the real problem was?

I downloaded Ad-Aware, in my experience one of the best anti-adware programs around, and installed to their system. For the next hour or so (figuring the restart after storms knocked power out momentarily) it went through the computer and located 553 bits of adware and spyware! No wonder it was crawling! Anyway after Ad-Aware scanned the system and quarantined the offending matter, the computer started performing much faster.

If your system seems to be slowing down, who knows but it might have some "barnacles" attached to the hull. Scrape 'em off with Ad-Aware, by Swedish developer Lavasoft. The basic program is free, with a paid version that comes with a lot more options and whistles. It's by far one of the more useful bits of software I have on my own systems.

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How about some wacky North Korean propaganda?

NK News is the only source you need (as if you really needed this sort of thing :-) for all the latest official party announcements from North Korea: enough Kim Jung Il to make you ill. Be sure to check out the Random Insult Generator for a healthy dose of ego-dashing vitriole. Special thanks to Melody Hallman-Daniel for sending in the link!

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